CONSTANCEMALLINSON@GMAIL.COM
Picasso’s Bastards
The smaller series entitled Picasso’s Bastards depict close ups of human-like faces set within detailed sections of landscapes. The features of the faces are made of bits of trash and natural detritus collected on my daily walks through Los Angeles. Rendered in a lush, near Old Masters technique, they manipulate tensions between the humorous or silly and the apocalyptic, the strangely beautiful and the grotesque. The historical roots reach back to Dutch still life vanitas , Surrealism, and Picasso’s Cubistic heads while they maintain an affinity with the dark humor of contemporary artists like Jim Shaw. Suggesting the human face is making its imprint everywhere in the ongoing environmental degradation, the paintings are far more complex in their formal investigations and multi-leveled content however. Hyper thick abstract passages co-exist with intricate representationalism instigating a playfulness between established genres. Similarly, the cast-off junk with its jewel tone colors, allusions to Modernist abstraction and attractive functional designs, alternates between the highest human achievements to its lowest as a throwaway culture.
Pi
Nature Morte:
The Nature Morte paintings consisting of Archimboldo-esque human figures inspired by decaying natural materials were exhibited widely from 2009 to 2011.Twisted branches, rotting stumps and logs, curling dried leaves and desiccated flora collected from my daily walks through Los Angeles’ streets and canyons were painted from direct observation in a technique reminiscent of botanical illustration or trompe d’oeil. Some are painted on grainy plywood as “backdrops” for decomposing woodland scenes or Renaissance like saints, and like all Mallinson’s work, provoke meditation on the human relationship to the natural world. Suggesting a mutual vulnerability and destruction in an era of environmental instability, the paintings also seem to represent a ruination of the previous pristine, scenery of her panoramic paintings or the progressive productions of Modernism itself. In some, fragments of human-made objects are intermingled with the flora and fauna to form eccentric, post- apocalyptic constructions, both an incrimination of the wasteful consumer culture and a monument to its ongoing ingenuity.
ME
RECENT WORK
With roots as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch, 17th Century Dutch still life, and 19th century panoramic landscape as well as heroic Modernist abstraction, these large scale figurative works are all interpretations of the contemporary landscape: a forest of dead trees bathes in an oily atmosphere; stormy Turner-esque skies are filled with falling found objects and massive accumulations of castoffs; a mucky dump contains bits and pieces of consumer and natural detritus retrieved from urban streets in the artist’s daily walks. As with the smaller paintings, these landscapes are full of contradictions. Terrifyingly beautiful, the forms of the dead trees and decaying leaves are interwoven with the bright and seductive objects and fragments produced for our hyper consumerist culture. The pairings of the natural and manufactured consider the mutual constructions and interdependencies of humans and nature and imagine their possible collapse. Past, present and future are simultaneously evoked promoting myriad questions about our attitudes towards nature and ourselves—the complexities and moral dilemmas of living in a techno, consumerist world as we simultaneously contribute to the earth’s destruction. Passages of thick gestural paint intermingled among the ruins suggest that abstract painting with its emphasis on personal expression also plays a part in exploring the visual language appropriate for expressing these endgame situations.
Panoramic Landscapes
The epic panoramic landscapes painted from 2001 to 2009 began as an investigation into the relationship between photographic and painted representations of landscape. Literally thousands of appropriated landscape images were “collaged” via painting to form dense imaginary landscapes incorporating multiple perspectives-from the microcosmic to the macro-- and conflicting narratives. Superseding the traditional single view of the landscape, they engage ideas of received information and its overriding influence on our perceptions of the natural as well as question historicist ideologies such as the Edenic, the pastoral, and the gendered gaze. Underlying the seductive touristic or advertising images rendered in an Old Masters technique, was a desire to subvert comforting ideas of nature to push for a newer paradigm that reflected globalism and the threatening of the world’s ecosystems by population, industry, and pollution. Spanning geography, time zones, and seasons, these paintings are tours de force in their scale and execution and have been appreciated for their ability to seduce and deliver a critique simultaneously and to posit a continuing relevance for painting in an era of ubiquitous mass media.
